Reconstructing language of 20,000 years ago would be a big stride toward whatever tongue those first emigrants spoke.
Linguists trying to reconstruct the language spoken by the ancestral human population have found that the world's major language groups bear strong echoes of the mother tongue's words for "one" and maybe "two," but nothing more.
We need political philosophers to listen, not dictate, to deconstruct and reconstruct our language, to give us tools for a new and rightly sceptical age.
All along Carnap (1932e, 1961a) merely conceded that it was more "convenient" to reconstruct the language of science on a physicalistic basis.
Our aim here is to draw on this growing body of knowledge in informal logic in order to take preliminary steps towards developing an architecture for computer systems that are able to recognise and reconstruct natural language arguments.
Much of its structure, however, can be deduced by the comparative method of reconstruction (a reconstructed language is called a protolanguage; reconstructed forms are marked with an asterisk).
But any attempt by these means to get back to "the origin of language" or to reconstruct the original language of the human race, if indeed there was one, has so far been beyond the reach of science.
Because data are still lacking from a great many places, the once-standard approach was to compare major representatives of each group for the purpose of reconstructing the language of the important dictionary Qieyun of ad 601 (Sui dynasty), which mainly represents a Southern language type.
By contrast, for Carnap, philosophy investigated and reconstructed existing language fragments, developed new logico-linguistic frameworks and suggested possible formal conventions for science, while, for Neurath, the investigation of science was pursued by an interdisciplinary meta-theory that encompassed empirical disciplines, again with a pragmatic orientation.
Their field is language revitalization, the science of reconstructing lost languages.
